Stupidity, Madness, Wisdom

Nikolaus Harscher and the Competing Discourses of Foolishness Around 1800

Abstract

In the literary feud between early Romanticism and late Enlightenment, around 1800 there were mutual accusations of stupidity, but also a fundamental revaluation of non-rational thinking or speaking as poetic inspiration or fool’s speech. The first part of the essay exemplifies these paradoxical relationships in Tieck’s comedy Prinz Zerbino, Kotzebue’s satire Der hyperboreeische Esel and Testimonia Auctorum de Merkelio, co-authored by Varnhagen. In a second step, the crisis-ridden aggravation of Romantic subjectivism is demonstrated on the basis of Steffens’s and Schleiermacher’s pupil Nikolaus Harscher: The ironic praise of stupidity and laziness and the quotations from Shakespeare’s fool’s speeches in Harscher’s letters from Halle 1807 can hardly conceal the existential threat that later leads him to madness. Even in Goethe’s excerpts from Harscher’s latest lifetime, as explained in the final part, the trace of Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium can be found.